Process automation in Terrassa: from the workshop to the office

Process automation in Terrassa almost never starts in the cloud. It starts with a piece of paper that takes three days to exist inside a computer, and with the decisions someone makes blind in the meantime.

Terrassa is not an office town

The town has 5,572 employer contribution accounts, which is the boring way of saying workplaces with registered staff. Of the general-scheme registrations, 12,560 are in workplaces with up to nine workers and another 17,935 in workplaces with ten to forty-nine. The figures come from the Idescat municipal profile.

There are more clues about what kind of company that is. The local vehicle fleet includes 18,259 industrial vehicles: vans, lorries and machinery that go out every morning. And the metalworking, machinery and electrical equipment branch produces 361.3 million euros of added value a year.

Translated: workshops, installers, distributors, assembly firms and small factories where the work does not happen in front of a screen. It happens in a unit, on a site or inside a van. The paper arrives later, and that gap is the problem. We wrote about selling in a town like this in digital marketing in Terrassa; this one is about what happens behind the door.

How a piece of paper travels through a company in Terrassa

Process automation in Terrassa always starts the same way: we follow one document from end to end before touching anything. It is the dullest part of our job and the part that finds the most.

The delivery note riding in the van

It is filled in by hand at unloading, the customer signs it and it stays in the folder on the passenger seat. It reaches the office when the driver remembers, usually on Friday, and there someone types it in. Between the goods leaving and the data existing in a computer, two, three or five days go by. Everything decided in those days is decided without information: stock, what is pending invoicing, whether that customer already got their order.

The hours written in a notebook

Each operator notes their own, the supervisor copies them into a spreadsheet on Monday, and payroll comes out of that, plus, with luck, the cost of each job. There is also a legal duty involved: the Spanish Workers' Statute requires a daily record of every person's working time. Kept on paper it is almost always kept badly, and the real cost of a job is known a month late, when it is no longer useful for quoting the next one.

The warning that only lives in the supervisor's head

That one machine is making an odd noise. That customer has to be called before you turn up. Two parts from last week's batch still need checking. None of it is written down anywhere, and the day that person goes on sick leave the company finds out all at once how much they knew.

Where we start automating processes when there is a workshop and an office

The order that works for us is always the same, and there is nothing spectacular about it:

1. Capture the data where it happens. The delivery note is filled in on a phone, with the customer and the items already loaded, and signed on screen. Nobody types it afterwards: it is already written.
2. Let it reach whoever is waiting for it. The moment it is signed, the office can see it. If the customer wants a copy by email, it goes out without anyone sending it.
3. Make it warn you when something is off. A half-delivered order, an hour that does not add up, a note left unsigned at the end of the day. The alert is worth more than the report.
4. Let the report write itself. Hours per job, material per customer, pending invoicing. If the three steps above are in place, this one is nearly free.

Notice that only the first is hard, and it is about people, not programs.

The mistake of starting with the big system

The usual reaction when it hurts is to replace the whole management system. It is the most expensive decision and the one we have seen stall most often: six months of rollout, training for everyone, and the delivery note still gets filled in by hand, because nobody in the unit is going to open a laptop.

We prefer the opposite order. First fix how the data is captured, using what you already have. If in a year the system really does fall short, you replace it knowing exactly what is missing, which is a far cheaper conversation. The full reasoning is in process automation: where to start.

What we do not automate in a workshop

• Anything that changes weekly. If the process is still being invented, automating it freezes it.
• Anything done once a month. Building it costs more than the task.
• Anything that needs judgement. Deciding whether a part passes or fails is not a rule: it is someone who has been looking at parts for twenty years.
• Anything that already works. It sounds obvious and it is the one most often ignored.

The longer filter, with the four questions we use to rule things out, is in which tasks to automate with AI.

How we build the automation without stopping production

In a service business you can change a process on any given Monday. In a workshop you cannot: there are committed orders and lorries that leave anyway. What we do is run the new part in parallel for two or three weeks. The delivery note is filled in on the phone and on paper, and the two are compared. Once they have said the same thing for ten days, the paper goes.

That double run looks like waste and is the opposite: it is what prevents the month of chaos that sends people back to the notebook for good.

One more workshop detail almost nobody plans for: signal. Inside a steel-framed warehouse phones drop off the network often. What we build stores whatever is written even with no connection and sends it when the signal comes back.

What we need from you

• One person who knows the process and can make decisions. They do not need to be technical; they need to know why it is done that way.
• Real documents: three actual delivery notes, the timesheet from a normal week, and the item list exactly as you keep it, quirks included.
• Access to the management system and to whatever has to be connected.
• Half an hour of the workshop team's time to try it. If it does not make sense to them it will not get used, however well it is built.

What process automation in Terrassa costs

This service is priced per project, not per monthly fee: it depends on what has to be built and it is agreed in writing before starting. That is how it appears on our pricing page, next to the rest of the process automation catalogue.

What does have a published rate is the web and online presence side, in case it is a useful reference: from 100 € a month for the landing page and 200 € for the website, with presence plans at 400, 750 and 1,500 € a month. All excluding VAT and with no lock-in.

And there is one saving that weighs more than hours in a workshop: invoicing sooner. If the delivery note exists the same day, the invoice goes out the same day. Getting paid a week earlier, every week, never shows up on a savings sheet and shows up in the bank.

What to look at after three months

• Days between delivering and invoicing. If they do not drop, something is not being used.
• Unsigned delivery notes at month end.
• Hours not assigned to any job.
• How often someone goes back to paper. The best indicator of all: if they go back, the tool is in the way and needs fixing, not insisting on.

We work from Palamós and drive up to the Vallès

We are based in Palamós and work with companies in Terrassa and across the Vallès. The first visit is worth doing on site, because some things only show up there; the rest runs fine remotely. If you produce industrial waste, by the way, the annual declaration handled by the Catalan Waste Agency is another of those forms that fills itself in once the data is already digital; around 500 establishments in the town file it.

If you want to start small, send us a photo of one of your delivery notes over WhatsApp, plus two lines about what happens to it afterwards. That is enough to say where we would start and how long it would take.